All extracting and archiving done from one physical hard drive to another, to reduce impact of disk contention.

Extraction

Compression

Size

WinRAR 3.70 beta 2

0:39

3:09

135 MB

7-ZIP 4.20

-

6:04

127 MB

7-ZIP 4.44 beta

0:40

3:03

125 MB

7-ZIP performance has doubled over the last two years. And it's slightly more efficient at compression, too. That's impressive.

Performance is no longer a reason to choose WinRAR over 7-ZIP. Granted, this is a sample size of one, a single test on a single machine, but it's hard to ignore the dramatic reversal of fortune.

I still like WinRAR's ultra-slick shell integration. But 7-ZIP is a viable competitor now in terms of raw clock time performance, and as always, it tends to produce smaller archives than RAR. This more than addresses my previous criticisms. Mea culpa, 7-ZIP.